


Misery Loves Company

by AnnaWritesFiction



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Angst, Eventual Romance, Experimental Style, F/M, Friends to Lovers, Friendship, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Romance
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-03-30
Updated: 2019-04-02
Packaged: 2019-12-26 21:10:25
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 6,429
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18290300
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AnnaWritesFiction/pseuds/AnnaWritesFiction
Summary: "...And she looked at my stump with so much pity, I mean, by what right? By what right does another outcast pity me?"In which Jaime and Brienne are seeing the same therapist, cross paths by chance, and end up finding comfort in each other.





	1. Dear Lily

_You hear it every time_  
One day the tears are dry  
in time the pain subsides and then  
you start to live again

**~SVIIB, _A thousand times more_**

 

 

 

**ONE**

 

Dr. Tyrell’s eyes are smiling behind her glasses as she hands the cards over.  Brienne knows what they are before shuffling through them—shrinks seem to unanimously love their Rorschach tests.  She is asked to briefly examine them one by one, and then provide a short description of what she sees in each.

The ink blots are a disconcerting sight. They look like they’ve been bled out instead of printed, and to Brienne, the mere fact that they are supposed to look like _anything_ at all attests to the uselessness of psychoanalysis, if anything. And yet here she is. And the ink blots _do_ look like _something_ to her, like many things in fact—things that, if she is to keep her job, she cannot blurt out in front of a goddamn _brain-fixer_.  There’s a red one that is conspicuously similar to the blood stain Renly’s body left on the asphalt while it was being dragged away from the crime scene; a black one whose nondescript shape somehow reminds her of the puddle of vomit she left on the adjacent sidewalk; a card with two parallel smudges eerily reminiscent of the dried mascara she had to wipe off her cheeks afterwards.

The doctor patiently waits for her to come up with each answer. She lies with horrific ease. _A bird. A dead fly. Children dancing and holding hands._ Harmless imagery.  There is something thoroughly pervasive about the way the other woman’s eyes stare into hers. They are brown, their cunning magnified by the lens correcting her far-sightedness. Dr. Tyrell looks like a wise bird, an exotic owl of sorts, and Brienne feels bad for disliking her—as far as shrinks go, this adorable old lady falls into the decent fifty percent. It’s the talking she cannot stand. Being coerced into discussing her feelings. Her trauma.

Trauma: a ridiculous word. People don’t ask to bear witness to terrible occurrences; they don’t ask to be forever changed by them. And as if the suffering isn’t enough, as if survivor’s guilt isn’t enough, she has to undergo this _torture_ in order to prove herself fit to keep working, to keep belonging somewhere, anywhere. She doesn’t need therapy, and neither does she need anyone’s fake concern _. I am not ruined forever_ , she thinks, looking into those smart brown eyes, the smiling ones. _I will be mended_ , she thinks _. I don’t need you. I need time._ Her lips are telling an altogether different story. _I can see a burnt pancake,_ they say. _And this one right there, it looks like a vase._

Dr. Tyrell nods almost rhythmically _. I see. Yes._ Her head is tilted slightly, the way a dog cranes its head while listening to incoherent human babbling. With every movement of that head, her heavy earrings oscillate from side to side, jingling. By the time the last card has been discussed, Brienne is exhausted. The exotic owl lady, however, seems dissatisfied and, to Brienne’s utter horror and dismay, retains that expectant look—a nerve-wrecking kind of stare that culminates in a dramatic raise of the eyebrows.

“Are you sure, my dear?” the elderly therapist finally says, leaning over the severe-looking mahogany desk. “Because remember, this is not an evaluation. There is no right and wrong answer—this is to help _me_ help _you_ , you understand?”

She understands. There is so much sympathy in Dr. Tyrell’s voice, and the fact that she just called her “my dear” is slowly bringing Brienne to tears. _I don’t need you_ , she wants to say. _I can be mended. I need time._

Instead, she tells the truth.

Blood stains. Vomit. Smudged makeup. Death.

 

 

**Okay, so apparently, I am doing this. I am doing the diary thing and I am too tired to even care whether it is ridiculous or not.**

**Tired! If that doesn’t make for a nice start! Olenna said this is supposed to help me evaluate the way I feel about things, and I already admitted to feeling something, even if that something is my utter disdain towards the process. But my brother —the crisis management expert of this otherwise laughably dysfunctional family— is paying for those sessions, so, for the sake of his money at least, I am gonna give this a try.**

**Speaking of feelings, I feel like a schoolgirl. I mean. I know there are technically many _schoolboys_ who keep diaries of their own. However, I am a bitter, depressed fourty-year-old and this diary is _mine_ , thus I can use it to channel my frustration into any stereotype I want. A fucking schoolgirl it is. When Olenna told me, when she specifically used the word _diary_ , I started laughing uncontrollably, because the first thing that sprang to mind was this image, a little girl scribbling boys’ names on a perfumed piece of paper,  mooning over schoolmates, or**— **picture this— penning an entry, complete with a date and a fucking “dear diary.”**

**Perhaps I should give it a ridiculous name, like my sister Cersei did at primary school. Something worryingly stupid, like “Lily”. Dear Lily, today my right hand, the one I eat and aim a gun and wipe my ass with, got blown off by a madman with a shotgun. Dear Lily, today I was told that I can no longer serve in the police force, but that’s okay since I am getting a medal and a nice, fat pension they reserve for cripples like yours truly. Dear Lily, today I went to the rehab center and my sister didn’t even want to see me, because my recently amputated arm puts her off. Dear Lily, did I mention that me and my sister fuck? Or is it my sister and I? I am sorry, Dear Lily. My father tried to make a literate man out of me so hard and yet, I, the Golden Son, Jaime Lannister—yes, _that_ Lannister, in case you are wondering— brought endless shame upon the family name by becoming a grammatically inept cop. Or, due to recent alterations, ninety something percent of a grammatically inept cop. **

**I am not sure Olenna thought this over. This is strenuous work. I have been practicing writing with my left hand for five weeks now, and I don’t think I’ll ever get any better than this. It takes time and the result is barely readable. Thankfully time is something I have in abundance these days. My tendons, however, aren’t being agreeable. They already hurt, and I cannot concentrate. Where was I?**

**Ah yes: I was supposed to be writing about my _feelings_. Therapists love discussing feelings, and mine is no exception. I’ve always hated discussing feelings, mainly because I suck at making sense of them. For example: am I angry right now? I suppose I should be. I am middle aged, jobless, and for the last few days, a tremendous itch on my missing hand keeps me awake at night. I keep failing at simple everyday tasks, from cutting a slice of cheese to flushing the goddamn toilet. I wouldn’t call myself angry, however. Instead, there is a sort of nothingness, a gap. I move from point A to point B mechanically, letting time slip away. I have no idea what day it is. I merely exist, and the simple act of existing depletes me. **

**Olenna says I should try to stick to a minimum of two pages per day, at least for now. I am making my letters big. Perhaps I should write about my sister, but that’s a story for another day. I’ll need a bigger shovel for such an enormous pile of shit.**

**Let’s keep this relatively harmless, shall we? Since I am getting close to filling up a second page, I will close my first entry by jotting down a list of places I’ve been to, off the top of my head: King’s Landing. Highgarden. Harrenhall. Dorne. Casterly Rock. Lannisport. Storm’s End. Winterfell. Riverrun. Estermont. ~~Estermont is nice. This is the island where me and Cersei first where Cersei and I first~~**

**Fuck  this.**

The adorable owl lady does not press for details with regards to the mugging, for which Brienne is grateful. “Whenever you feel comfortable, we shall talk about it”, she says. Brienne doubts she will ever feel comfortable enough, but doesn’t verbally reject the offer.

Dr. Tyrell then is curious about Renly himself. “Where you related?” Brienne shakes her head, _no_ , and the second question nearly breaks her. “Was he your fiancé, then?”

Brienne’s fingers are already digging holes in the leather armchair. She is thinking of Renly’s dark eyes, of his slender body and proud stature. If he had ever been into girls, those girls would have looked and acted nothing like her.  She shakes her head again. “He was my best friend.”

“Oh, I see.” She is doing the tilted head thing again, and that’s how Brienne knows this woman can read minds. “Your best friend.  But you’d always longed for more than that, did you not?” There is a pregnant pause, a prolonged patch of silence during which Brienne is painfully aware of the elderly therapist’s inquisitive stare, of her scribbling hand under the desk and the clock on the wall announcing the death of each passing second.

The clock is an antique, expensive-looking and fairly noisy. There is an inscription carved upon the wooden frame, and Brienne knows it reads _Valar Morghulis_ without having to squint. _All men must die_. Most old clocks are macabre like that, as if the reality of time tirelessly slipping through each and every living being isn’t horrific enough. Her house in Tarth, the one she grew up in, had a very similar clock, one that declared something along the lines of, _dying is certain, the time is not_. She didn’t understand the meaning of that statement until she saw the knife enter and exit Renly’s chest.

“I believe my time is up.” There are five or so minutes left, they both know it, but the air inside the office is unbearable and Brienne doesn’t want to breathe it any longer. She pushes herself to a standing position, avoiding any eye contact with the therapist. “I guess we’ll continue next week. Have a nice day, Dr. Tyrell.”

Dr. Tyrell smiles and shuts her notebook with a resounding _poof._ Brienne can’t help but notice how many things were written on the page she fleetingly got to look at. _If this woman has a family,_ she thinks _, she will surely have many things to tell them tonight. Or is patient information classified even to spouses and children?_ It would be rude to ask, so she doesn’t.

“You have a nice day too, my dear. And please, call me Olenna. Titles make me feel old, and my arthritis gives me enough of that already.”

Brienne nods and exits the office. _Adorable, wise,_ and _funny_. Perhaps she should let herself like this woman, this wise owl who reads thoughts. She walks up to the secretary’s desk and arranges next week’s session.

It’s still sunny when she gets outside, and Brienne realizes she would kill for a nice, warm cup of coffee. A few blocks down the street there is a quiet, cozy bakery that serves coffee as well, complete with nicely decorated tables. She used to stop there before going to work, early in the morning, but now she habitually avoids it, just like she avoids every place she has memories of Renly in. 

(Apparently, the city isn’t big enough for that.)

She sits in her usual corner, by the window, with a lovely view of the street and its passersby. The glass is smudged in parts, from yesterday’s rain, but Brienne barely notices. Instead, she mentally follows the ebb and flow of people outside, the perennial movement of the city, until it lulls her into a semblance of waking oblivion. No matter what, normal people keep doing boring everyday things; there is comfort in that.

Her order arrives, and it is only then that she realizes she’s bought a cinnamon roll, as well, because _of course she would_. She glares at it. It doesn’t seem to give many fucks, seeing as it is an edible product without a conscience of its own. It just _sits_ there, in a puddle of grease and sugar, looking all smug and indifferent. She takes a tentative bite. She never liked the darn things, but she would swear this one tastes different. A bit stale, perhaps.

Perhaps _everything_ will taste different, from now on.

 

 

**This is not exactly a second entry. It’s three in the goddamn morning and I can’t sleep. You see, dear Lily, I want to scratch my right hand until it bleeds. Too bad it no longer exists.**

**Speaking of hands ~~(writing about hands?),~~ here is a good one: where did Jaime’s hand go after the explosion? _Everywhere_. Ahahahahahahaha. Ya geddit? Because it was blown to fucking bits. _Poof!_**

**Something even funnier:  yesterday, at the grocery store, I accidentally dropped my wallet, and couldn’t pick the change up on my own, so I looked to the girl waiting in line, right behind me. I said, “Excuse me, Miss, do you mind giving me a hand?”  The moment I’d said it, I started laughing so hard I nearly suffocated. I once read somewhere about an ancient philosopher who died laughing at one of his own jokes—this is how he must have felt, I reckon. The girl was gawking at me, gods, the _look_ on her face, it was _priceless._ Cersei would never approve, of course. She’d say my sense of humor lacks subtlety. **

**I suppose her opinion no longer matters, anyway. You see, cripples disgust her, and now I happen to be one of those. You might even say, _as far as sisters go, yours surely sounds horrible_. And you’d be right. Is it normal to love a horrible human being, to ache for them whenever they are out of your reach? I guess it is as normal as incest— or, better yet, as normal as throwing a huge fortune in the trash can in order to be able to chase baddies. Maybe this is as far as my emotional intelligence can go. Maybe I am just _this_ problematic. **

**At least, before losing my arm, I was good at _something_. Now I am useless, on top of problematic, and this has caused me to reexamine my entire life. Sometimes, as I fail at shaving my face, bleeding myself dry, I stare into the mirror, until my reflection stops looking like me, until it stops looking like anything at all. Thinking that, maybe, if I just let myself blur into nothingness, the consequences of being me will fade away. Olenna says that kind of thinking is toxic. Does wanting to disappear qualify as suicidal? I very much doubt I could pull the trigger. It requires a certain amount of courage I sorely lack. ~~And a hand. Let's not forget that. Although technically I could use the left~~**

**See, this is exactly the kind of shit I wanted to avoid. I am wallowing in self-pity right now. Tomorrow I’ll tell Olenna that this diary thing is nonsense. Pitying myself doesn’t help me. All of this doesn’t work. Instead of feeling better all I have accomplished is to make my tendons hurt. ~~And it’s not like the itch went anywhere.~~ ~~My phantom limb itches like hell. It itches so much that, if it was still attached on me, I would chop it off myself.~~**

**I will go back to bed now.**

 

There is a lovely looking vase on the small table in the waiting room. Colorful patterns adorn its painted glass, and within it, a meticulously arranged bouquet of roses is soaking in its death pool. She never understood the appeal of decorating an interior space with rotting plant genitalia. Renly loved flowers, however. Every time she went to visit him in his apartment, it smelled like a different shade of spring. Daisies. Lilies. Lavender. She used to tease him about it, the silliness of it. Now his apartment smells so impersonal—an amalgam of cleaning products and the absence of living beings.

On the same table, next to the vase Brienne decides she hates, rests a small pile of glossy magazines. Outrageously thin, beautiful women smile at her from their shiny covers—the kind that look good in tight dresses, and never have to slouch in order talk to a man. She glares at them, not because they have done anything to harm her personally, but because their lives must be so much easier than hers. Or so she supposes. She’s never been anyone other than herself, after all.

The door opens. Having grown up being the tallest person in pretty much any crowd, Brienne usually tries to be discreet, to not draw attention to herself. She never directs her gaze towards a stranger unless she’s being talked to. But when the man walks out of the therapist’s office, something compels her to look, and she does.

At first she thinks it’s due to his physical beauty, for he is a ridiculously good-looking man—middle aged, a bit worn, his unkempt stubble not doing justice to his features, but still. There is a large window on the eastern wall of the waiting room, and the sunlight pouring through the gap between the curtains casts a streak of gold across his hair. He is well-dressed, too, and the overall impression is so perfect it almost feels unfair.

Probably because she is staring, or maybe simply because she is something of a freak herself, the man stops for a few seconds, idle in front of the gaping door, and his green eyes meet hers. Green eyes! Brienne momentarily fights the impulse to walk up to the man and ask him why the fuck he’s here. _This is a place for imperfection_ , she thinks. _You belong with the happy ladies on the glossies._

But then she _sees_ it. She realizes the absence of a lower arm from the corner of her eye, and then everything falls into place, the stubble, the nearly imperceptible slouch —as if he’s carrying something heavy— the shrink, the stare. A wild fight-or-flight reflex swirls inside her with nowhere to go. Suddenly, Brienne feels trapped. She should probably say something meaningless, like “sorry” or “excuse me sir” and cross the goddamn door he very politely held open for her. But she is just frozen there, utterly embarrassed by her own lack of discretion, thinking the same exact thought on repeat, _don’t look at the stump, don’t look at the stump, don’t look at the stump, don’t—_

She looks at the stump.

 

 

 


	2. Ugly like a sin, pretty like a painting

 

 

**TWO**

 

 

“What about your dreams?” Olenna says.

“I am sorry, _dreams?_ ”

“Any recurring nightmares? Anything particularly odd or out of the ordinary? You see dear, dreams are the tool with which our subconscious tries to make sense of itself. You are obviously under a lot of stress you have no control over, and that stress could be manifesting itself in your sleeping habits. So, what about your dreams?”

“I keep seeing this one dream lately”, Brienne says. “I see that I am a swordswoman.”

“A swordswoman? You mean, like in the middle ages?”

A frown spreads across Brienne’s features, as if recalling the specifics of the dream requires physical exertion. “Yes, but it’s a different kind of middle ages. There’s magic, I think—dragons, sorcerers and the like. And I am a swordswoman.”

Scribbling sounds. The clock bewails the passing of moments, tick, tick, tick. Olenna’s eyes are dancing behind her glasses, and Brienne wishes she could see herself through them. “What about Renly?” the elderly therapist finally asks. “Is he in this strange medieval world, as well?”

“Yes. He’s my King. And I am some sort of Lady-Knight, sworn to protect him.” A small smile begins and ends its frustratingly small life-cycle on Brienne’s lips. Her whole face darkens. “I keep failing, because even though I am supposed to guard him, a shadow enters his tent and murders him in front of my eyes.”

“A shadow?”

“Yes.”

“So, in your dream, the way he dies is identical to the way he died in the real world, only that this time, the culprit is some dark supernatural force? Is this what you intend by the word _shadow_?”

“Yes. I mean I think so. It looks like blood magic, as if some dark deity I cannot stop appears out of nowhere and just… stabs him. He dies in my arms, and I am screaming, and that’s when I usually wake up. But you know what the worst part is?”

Olenna smiles, but it’s a different kind of smile than the ones Brienne is used to receiving from the older woman. There is more than just sympathy packed in the way the corners of her mouth twitch and then turn slightly upwards; there is vicariousness.

“I know, dear. I know precisely what the worst part is. But I am not the one undergoing therapy, so I would like to hear it from your own lips, in your own words.”

Brienne’s eyes are brimming once more with tears. She swears she didn’t cry so often, once. She swears there is something about the way this old lady calls her _my dear_. There is something about the way cinnamon rolls taste and flowers smell.

Perhaps there’s just something about the world these days.

“The worst part, well. The worst part is that, when I wake up, the nightmare is over, and yet it isn’t. Because—because—even though I am no longer a warrior, even though I am no longer in the Middle Ages, it’s like the nightmare has seeped into this world. Because Renly is still dead, and I still haven’t been able to protect him, and I am still powerless against this simple fact.”

 

**There are many things I hate about this new state of affairs. The staring is by far the worst.**

**Today, it happened right after the session. Olenna was asking me about my relationship with Cersei ~~and I didn’t want to talk about that sort of thing anymore~~ and I got upset. I stormed off, I think—anger makes me forgetful, so there is a small gap, a lapse if you like—so, next thing I knew, I was halfway through the office door, facing the waiting room, the world’s ugliest bitch staring at me as if I were a freak or something. **

**My word, she was ugly like a sin: tall, unbe-fucking-lievably tall, the size of both her lips and nose disproportionate to the rest of her face. Her forehead was huge and surrounded by the worst haircut I’ve ever seen on _any_ person. Clad in black, loose-fitting clothes, the woman didn’t just look like she didn’t care about her appearance, I would swear she actively tried to make herself look as grotesque as possible. And _she_ looked at _my_ stump with such pity, I mean _by what right?_ By what right does another outcast pity _me_? **

**Who am I kidding? I used to be precisely that kind of person. I would stare at cripples, at their wheelchairs, their missing arms and legs. Hells, I was already staring at her ugly face before she took notice of my stump, as if being unattractive qualifies as a disability. I don’t even know this woman, her hopes and fears, and I’ve spent half a page trashing her physical appearance. Perhaps assholes like me are the exact reason why she needs therapy.**

**Perhaps her only crime was the consternation on her face, which brought back memories of Cersei’s aptly expressed disgust—a contrast of sorts. For a split second, I witnessed more concern on a stranger’s countenance ~~than my own sister has ever than my lover has ever than~~**

**Wait. I remember that face. She was on the news a few weeks ago. A month, maybe? Two months? Anyway—this woman, she was on the news. I am sure of it because homicide used to be my dream department—I wanted to solve murders once, you see, like those detectives you read about in books—and I obsessively followed every development in well-known murder cases. She was approached many times by several news outlets, and she always refused to answer the journalists’ questions, always tried to steer clear of the cameras. I specifically remember being impressed by her imposing stature, because truth be told, it’s not every day that you encounter a woman this big. The murder victim was some guy in his early thirties, unremarkable in all aspects apart from one: he was to inherit a huge sum of money from his older brother, as well as the reins of said brother’s fairly big company. Apparently, the giantess and the victim were returning from a night out when they were attacked by muggers. She managed to beat up one of them, but the other stabbed her friend in the heart, stole his wallet and ran away.**

**Perfect. Now, instead of thinking about my own problems—and there is a shit ton of them these days—I find myself feeling sorry for a bitch whose name I don’t know, whose face I’ve only seen like, twice in my entire life. It’s not assholes like me, the reason she is seeing a shrink, after all. She saw her best friend get stabbed to death in some alley. Is that better or worse than having a limb blown off? Is it better to love someone you can’t and shouldn’t have, or to love someone who no longer exists?**

**In other words, who has it worse? Me— or her?**

 

The traffic is almost surreal. Nearly an hour spent inside the car,  Brienne is still a few blocks away from the therapist’s office, looking at the raindrops flatten against her windowsill before they tumble downwards like falling tears. At this rate, she won’t be home before dusk.  

She wishes she could listen to some music, but her phone is low on battery, and the car radio doesn’t seem willing to tune in to any station, probably due to the bad weather, gracing her ears with static instead.

 Brienne loves music, especially the quiet, sensual kind, like jazz. A few weeks after they‘d first met, Renly was surprised to find out. “The way you kick people’s asses in hand to hand combat predisposed me otherwise,” he’d said.  “I mean, I’d expected you to wake up every morning and do pushups to some heavy rock tune, but jazz? _Really?_ ” He had a way of uttering the word _really_ , whenever he wanted to express incredulousness; he would raise one eyebrow and lower the other, the rest of his face smiling in an utterly funny yet elegant way.

They ended up bonding over this, their mutual love for soft music. Renly was more of a pop fan, but they had several favorites in common, and before either of them knew they’d become inseparable, attending live shows together, comparing vinyl collections, discussing albums. Renly had genuinely loved her to the extent friends can love one another, and yet, it’d never been enough.  Almost everyone in college knew about his sexual preferences, but for some reason, she was the last to find out. By then it was already too late for her.

Not that she could have stood a chance. Renly was one of those extremely gifted people, equally smart and handsome, equally kind and confident. He carried himself with a contained poise, well-dressed, his features symmetrical to a fault.

The combined sound of horns blowing and vivid cursing brings her back to reality. The traffic has somewhat cleared up, for the next few hundred yards at least. Angry drivers are yelling at her from nearly every direction, so she lets the car slide forward for a while, until everyone is stuck again.

Then her attention goes back to the raindrops, to the way part of the outside world seems to contort to funny shapes and melt away behind them. The sound the water makes as it meets the metallic roof is soothing, subtle. All of this beauty, all of the beauty to come, all of the beauty that will ever be, the droplets, the music, the smell of grass after a heavy downpour, he’s incapable of witnessing any of it. It must be cold underground, especially in this weather. Does humidity make a body decompose slower of faster? Water supports life, so she assumes the latter. Is he already blackish, swollen, have his eyes already been eaten by worms?

All of a sudden, Brienne’s thoughts are veering away from her dead best friend and towards the man she met a few hours ago, at the therapist’s waiting room. She fleetingly wonders where the rest of him is right now. What does a hospital do with amputated limbs? She knows not. Perhaps this man’s lower arm is decaying somewhere, in this very moment, just like the entirety of what once was Renly is. _Decay, decay, decay_. In the privacy of the car, Brienne whispers the word on repeat, until it stops conveying any meaning whatsoever. Which missing piece hurts the most, she wonders, the metaphorical or the literal? She likes to believe that she would have sacrificed an arm for Renly’s life—does that mean the outrageously good-looking fellow from earlier has it better? Perhaps their plight is similar. Perhaps the main problem isn’t the loss itself, but the harrowing feeling of powerlessness.

What is the point of carrying on, if you can’t keep pieces of you from disintegrating?

 

 

**Olenna insists that I should call Tyrion, or my father, or anyone other than my sister, for that matter. But since we’ve hereby established I have the emotional maturity of an adolescent, and given this is _my diary_ and I can be as petty as you please, here is an answer to that _: I don’t wanna._ **

**Why? There is no _why._ Why is _any_ of this happening? You think I am being pathetic? You have no idea how pathetic I can be, if I put my mind to it. And I intend to wholeheartedly embrace my misery, because why the fuck not? There is a certain appeal in self-destruction. I have nothing else to look forward to**— **nothing interesting, at least. Imagine me talking to my father about it: the way his eyebrows will slowly join one another in pure, hairy disapproval, the way those eyes will glare at nothing in particular, just like a predatory reptile glares at a prospective meal. _I told you so,_ he’ll tell me, and there will be nothing sympathetic, or relieving, or remotely friendly about the timbre of his voice.**

**As for my brother? Since the ~~accident happening shootout~~ loss of my arm, I’ve spoken to Tyrion like three times. The first one was when he visited me at the hospital, but that barely counts, since I was heavily drugged, for the pain. The other two, phone calls, both initiated by him. _I understand how you feel_ he kept saying, but he very much cannot, nobody can, just like I can’t imagine what it feels like for him, being a dwarf I mean. One would say that, between ~~my brother and I~~ my brother and me, I am the privileged one, arm or no arm, but still, my maiming has cast an invisible wall between us. Tyrion is a happily married man, and despite all the drama between him and our father, he is the gifted son, the one capable of continuing the family business. Is it mean spirited of me to not want to be around happy people just yet? **

**You know what? The more I think about it, the closer I come to the conclusion that there is only one person in the world I would genuinely ~~not mind tolerate stand~~ like to talk to. In fact, I am going to stop scribbling nonsense and look her up on the internet right now. **

When she arrives home, the weather has cleared up and the sky is riddled with stars. Brienne crosses the main entrance, walks past the elevator and goes directly for the stairs. Her apartment is on the fifth floor, but she genuinely despises confined spaces, plus it is a nice opportunity to get her blood flowing after a ridiculous amount of time spent inside the car.

No sooner has she closed the door behind her than the phone begins to ring. It is her father. “Good evening, Princess,” he says. The _Princess_ thing is a running joke between them. When she was little, he used to read fairytales to her, before tucking her in, and she’d often complain about how the princesses were always long-haired, slim-bodied beauties, never tomboyish, ungainly girls like herself. Her regularly expressed disappointment had once prompted her father to tell her: _you know what? Who cares if there aren’t tall, clumsy Princesses? You can be the first, if you like._

“Hey, dad.”

 “How are we today?”  The casual irregularities of his grammar never fail to make Brienne smile—the way the first-person plural sometimes substitutes the second-person singular. _How are we today? Is our mood any better? Are we getting enough fresh air?_

 “I am fine,” she says, a pang of guilt tugging at her guts. They used to be close, and now she avoids discussing her feelings with very same the man who raised her on his own. “I am returning to work soon, probably next week”, she adds. Were she any other trainer, they would have fired her without a second thought, but Brienne can teach self-defence like nobody’s business, so there’s that.

“That’s wonderful news!” The tone of her father’s voice is in stark contrast with the word _wonderful._ “What about the journalists? Have those fuckers left you alone?”

“Yes, I think.” Brienne sighs, her fingers busy tying the cord in tight knots. “How are you, dad?”

“More of the same, Princess. Nothing particularly interesting about an old widower’s life, is there? The highlight of my day is hearing you talk about your big city life. So, how is it? The big city life?”

Brienne guffaws at that. “The big city life? It’s marvelous. Case in point: today I spent the better part of my afternoon staring at other people’s cars from the comfort of my own. One can never have enough of these small pleasures.”

There is a brief pause from the other side of the line. Then: “You can always come home, you know. Tarth isn’t the island it used to be” —

“Dad.”

“You can find a job suitable for you here, if you want.”

“Dad. I can’t come back. I have a life here. You may not approve of it, but I happen to like it, hardship or not.”

“And perhaps a change of scenery could help” —

“ _Dad._ ” Her eyes slide to the cord, to the way it’s now tangled around her fingertips. Despite not being an actual believer, she is praying to every known god that her father has grown tired of the conversation. “I am not going to run away like that. There are people I care about here—the girls, for starters. _A change of scenery_ , as you put it, will not help me deal with my problems, and there are a bunch of them at the moment. Plus, you think I haven’t thought of it already? If I had a coin for every time someone told me to do just that, return home, I’d be rich as” —

A Lannister. _Rich as a Lannister_.

“Brienne? Are you still there?”

Brienne comes up with a pathetic excuse in order to hang up. Her father sounds disappointed, but she isn’t in the mood for chatter. She isn’t in the mood for anything, really. She just wants to change into something comfortable and sleep, stop thinking, erase everyone and everything. Her day was awful in the first place, but this unsolicited mental connection was the cherry on the sundae.

The man Brienne saw exit Olenna’s office, he was the eldest son of Tywin Lannister, ultra rich real estate mogul and renowned political consultant. So, on top of a face that looks like a moving painting, this guy also has an outrageously wealthy family. One day, he’ll more or less own the entire city. All that privilege, and yet tragedy somehow found its way to him, broke him even.

And if a person like that _can_ be broken, what are the odds that _she_ can heal?

 

 

**The case is relatively fresh. Thank the gods for that, for it would be difficult as hell otherwise. Since I only remembered scarce details, all I could do was feed the search engine keywords, like ‘early thirties’ and ‘mugging’, and hope. It took a great deal of aimless scrolling but the internet never disappoints.**

**There was hardly a picture of her, still. Most were blurry, the angles awkward at best, and the giantess seemed sad in each and every one of them. I suppose this isn’t precisely surprising. A loss is a loss, and if those two were indeed close, for her it must have felt like a different kind of amputation. It was hard for me to look at those pictures and not commiserate. I wonder if this is the general impression I give other people now** — **a sad sack of a human being, something akin to those sea creatures that die and leave an uninhabited shell behind. I wonder if this woman pities me more than I pity her.**

**“The victim’s closest friend”, some articles referred to the woman as. Or: “a friend who was with the victim when the mugging occurred.” I didn’t have high hopes. This is a person who obviously goes to great lengths in order to avoid the spotlight. And anyway, with an appearance like that, who can blame her? The point is I wasn’t really expecting to find a name, until I _did_ find it: Brienne. A strong name, a bunch of consonants and vowels arranged so that, pronounced together, they sound as sturdy as she looks. **

**In a way, it is rather daunting to think about. You see, dear Lily, I am still looking at this giantess on my screen, at her perennially angry blue eyes and her enormous, muscular figure, thinking: this warrior woman, who has a warrior’s name, she is broken.**

**How could I have _ever_ stood a chance? **

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> This is purely an experimental thing that I've started writing, off the top of my mind. I wanted to try something outside of my comfort zone with regards to style, language, and POV. 
> 
> This is purely an AU work, meaning that, although the world is technically the same, we are several centuries into the future, so the way of life, technology, societal norms etc. described in this work are pretty much those of the here and now. Some characters, as well as the relationships between them, are more or less the same, whereas I've randomly changed some things in order to serve my narrative better. 
> 
> Sorry for any mistakes, I take full responsibility for all of them!


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